'Slickers' Sequel May Put Crystal Back In Saddle

MOVIES - FILM CLIPS

Look for Billy Crystal to do a City Slickers sequel in which he'll bend - if not break - the law.

Crystal, who is on the road to promote his Mr. Saturday Night movie, said, ''We're actively talking about another City Slickers. It would be much different from the first.''

Last year's comedy hit had Crystal and co-stars Daniel Stern and Bruno Kirby coping with midlife crises by becoming vacation-time cowboys. The next Slickers, Crystal said, would revolve around ''some elaborate scheme, some sort of big caper - just to see if they could do it. Of course, whatever they took, they'd give back.''

Before he gets heavily involved in that - or any project - he wants to recuperate from the rigors of making Mr. Saturday Night, the feature he co-wrote, directed and in which he stars as stand-up comic Buddy Young Jr. from the dawning to the final days of Young's career.

It was a labor of love with ''a lot of very personal moments, particularly when young Buddy and his brother are entertaining their parents in the living room. For Buddy, like me, being on stage is the safest place to be - you feel invigorated, powerful, in control.''

Toronto: A bustling Hollywood North

Talk about northern exposure.

Toronto is looking more and more like Hollywood these days with some 30 TV and feature film productions rolling in that Canadian city.

Among them is Viacom Pictures' Taking the Heat, a Showtime movie starring George Segal, Alan Arkin, Peter Boyle, Tony Goldwyn and Lynn Whitfield. The city also is the setting for the TV docudrama/series Heart of Courage with Jeopardy host Alex Trebek and the TV series Kung Fu: The Legend Continues with David Carradine.

Checking into Toronto soon will be Michael J. Fox for Life With Mikey, Don Johnson and Rebecca DeMornay for Sidney Lumet's Beyond Innocence and Jeremy Irons and John Lone for the film version of M. Butterfly.

Baseball films will try for a hit

Following in the spikes of the hit A League of Their Own is a full plate of baseball films. Coming up to bat Oct. 2 will be Tom Selleck's Mr. Baseball, which was filmed in Japan. And after that there will be Rookie of the Year, starring Daniel Stern. James Woods stars in Blue - about a school of baseball umpires. . . .

Writer Michael Tolkin, who adapted his satirical novel The Player for the big screen, has announced his next project: The New Age. Described as a dark comedy, Tolkin's screenplay is again set in the Hollywood milieu - it's about a former agent and his wife who open a hip clothing store in order to raise money for their divorce. . . .

It worked last year with Beauty and the Beast, so why not try again? The Disney studio plans to show a work-in-progress version of its animated feature Aladdin at the New York Film Festival later this month. The unfinished movie, based on the Arabian Nights tale, will screen Sept. 26. . . .

Al Pacino and director Brian De Palma won't be getting back together to make another gangster movie as soon as planned. The actor and the director who collaborated on Scarface expected to be in production this fall with Carlita's Way. But script problems have reared their head, and now it's anticipated that the mobster saga won't get under way until next spring - at least.